Arborlight develops advanced lighting systems and components for general illumination and specialized applications. Our cutting-edge LED lighting components promise to revolutionize the market for efficient, mercury free lighting for retail and office settings. Combining mature, time-proven lighting components with dramatically simpler device architecture, our systems deliver ultra-bright, high quality lighting for the next generation of commercial products using less LED's with greater brightness at a lower cost than products currently available. [from the Arborlight website]

Arborlight wants every indoor space to be able to reap the benefits of natural -- or as close to natural -- sunlight, and thanks to a $1.7 million venture capital investment, the company is one step closer to that goal.

The Ann Arbor-based technology company recently announced that it landed the investment, led by the Michigan Angel Fund, Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund and a Local Development Finance Authority microloan administered by Ann Arbor SPARK, to further commercialization efforts for its award-winning LightWell product.

LightWell is a luminaire that emulates daylight, and changes color, intensity and direction in real time and in sync with the sun's position in the sky in location to where the light is located.

The LED technology is different from most indoor lighting, which changes at rates the eyes can noticeably sense.

The fixtures can be controlled by a mobile or web app, allowing users to change the location and adjust the color, brightness and time of day for different lighting.

"The Michigan Angel Fund is focused on companies like Arborlight that need early investment to make the leap, and bring a product to market," Skip Simms, MAF managing director, said in a statement.

"Arborlight's potential is impressive, and the company is an exciting example of how technology can be incubated in a university setting, and progress forward and have real economic impact."

Arborlight, which is a spinoff from the University of Michigan's Office of Technology Transfer, got its start after participating in Ann Arbor SPARK's Entrepreneur Boot Camp in 2010.

Michael Forbis, the company's CEO, said the product has been in high demand, and the money will help provide the resources it needs to get the product to market.

"The evidence supporting the positive health and cognitive effects of dynamic daylight conditions in work, school, medical and retail environments is overwhelming. The demand for daylight in spaces deprived of traditional windows and skylights is a multibillion dollar opportunity," Forbis said in a statement.

"With the support of our investment community, Arborlight is meeting this substantial demand with its much acclaimed Daylight Emulation technology for commercial and home applications. These additional resources will enable the company to expand the marketing, sales, operations and engineering teams immediately."

"ArborLight is working on mellowing the harsh, highly directional light emitted by LEDs by “spreading that light out, making it more glare free, by using wave guides and changing the color of the light.”

Initially ArborLight was working in replacements for T8 flourescent bulbs — but that’s a brutally competitive market. Intead, ArborLIght is working on something called daylight emulation.

“Daylight through a window has unique spectrum, temperature and dynamics, and it changes throughout the day,” Forbis siad. “It plays into one’s circadian rhythm, one’s alertness.”

So imagine having a skylight in a room stories underground, or in the middle of an office building under several floors above and far away from any window. ArborLight is creating ceiling fixtures that look amazingly like skylights. The light can be adjusted so that mornings and evenings, it’s more yellow and less intense. At noontime, it’s more blue and intense."

"ANN ARBOR, Mich. ­­ – A University of Michigan clean energy start-up looks to turn on investors and future customers to a new lighting technology that offers a cleaner, longer lasting and higher quality alternative to today’s fluorescent tubes.

Headquartered in the U-M Tech Transfer’s Venture Accelerator, Arborlight LLC develops sophisticated lighting solutions for clients and leverages its patent-pending technology to develop a light-emitting diode (LED)-based, drop-in replacement for linear, fluorescent tubes. These replacements are mercury-free, last more than 50,000 hours, and provide a cost-effective source of uniform, bright light – desired features currently unmet in the LED lighting market.

'Our current designs suggest that our lamps will be considerably more efficient, more durable and robust than today’s glass fluorescent tubes,' said Max Shtein, a U-M materials science and engineering professor, who with U-M Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor P.C. Ku, conceived of the lighting architecture at the heart of Arborlight. 'The opportunity here is tremendous because there are hundreds of millions of these kinds of fluorescent tubes being replaced every year in the U.S.

'In addition to this being a commercial opportunity, we could improve energy efficiency in lighting and eliminate over five metric tons of mercury from the waste processing stream each year in the U.S. alone.'"
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